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Flip the Switch: Virtue, Programming, and the Prospect of Automatic Agency in WALL•E Adam J

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Flip the Switch: Virtue, Programming, and the Prospect of Automatic Agency in WALL•E Adam J SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL 2018, VOL. 83, NO. 1, 41–56 https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2017.1399434 Flip the Switch: Virtue, Programming, and the Prospect of Automatic Agency in WALL•E Adam J. Gaffey Department of Communication Studies, Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Critiques of the Internet age often place technological change in contest Agency; rhetoric and film; with social virtues. This essay analyzes the 2008 Pixar film WALL•E to better technology; virtues; WALL•E understand how the interplay of these positions is presented in popular form. I argue the film reconciles this tension by framing virtues as both integral to living well with technology, and as a necessary ability of human beings. I refer to this framing as automatic agency. An agentic reading of WALL•E offers two points of interest for rhetorical critics. It highlights the drawbacks to narratives that rely on the agent-act ratio as public pedagogy, and draws attention to the tendency of framing virtues through the lens of mechanized technology rather than techne. “We’ll see who’s powerless now.” —Captain McCrea (WALL•E)1 In its rationale to rescind prior prescriptions on screen exposure for toddlers, the American Academy of Pediatrics aptly identified a broader cultural transition afoot: “In a world where ‘screen time’ is becoming simply ‘time,’ our policies must evolve or become obsolete.”2 Public polling indicates the technical sphere of child rearing isn’t the only space where questions on living well with technology persist. A recent PEW survey found a plurality of respondents consider the prospect of continuously consuming information with devices or implants a “change for the worse” for society, even as such a future seems likely.3 These viewpoints illustrate the complex implications in assessing the Internet age. As Adam Gopnik clarifies, the “shifts in communication” that mark this moment are distinctive for being both “unprecedented” and “the big social revolution we live with.”4 For others, the Internet age—what Gopnik calls the “changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates”5 —fosters a competition between technology use and social virtues, making relevant debates on the loss of intimacy6 , loss of mental acuity7 , and loss of community8, to name a few.9 Such a context provides a unique opportunity for messages that attempt to reconcile how to live well with technology. Few popular texts are better positioned to negotiate this question than the 2008 Pixar film, WALL•E.10 Upon its release, critics rightly noticed how the film reflected resonant public concerns, with some even employing possessive pronouns to describe its narrative arc. A. O. Scott praised WALL•E as a “cinematic poem” that offers a “cartoon vision of our own potential extinction.”11 Bob Mondello saw the film as a “cautionary tale” within the then-burgeoning rise of mobile technology12 that warns against “getting so caught up in our gadgetry that we forget to look at the stars and take a back seat to romance.”13 While popular texts have long been sites for contemplating the relation between technological advancement and human values, WALL•E made this tension topical to the Internet age—a narrative formula extended in a legion of subsequent works, including: The Social CONTACT Adam J. Gaffey [email protected] Department of Communication Studies, Winona State University, 175 West Mark Street, Winona, MN 55987, USA. © 2017 Southern States Communication Association 42 A. J. GAFFEY Network (2010), Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), The Circle (2017), and the on-going anthology series, Black Mirror (2011—). Within this field of popular texts, though, WALL•E has remained a cultural heuristic for social questions of technology beyond its initial popular release, as evidenced in Amelia Tait’s 2016 observation that modern culture often seems matched to WALL•E’s plot; we are “living in Pixar’s future.”14 It isn’t just WALL•E’s relation to “‘archetypal’ aspects of our present” that make it an important site of study, however.15 As J. P. Telotte posits, the film’s influence extends from Pixar’s tendency to “suggest ways to get back, to map our alternatives to a postmodern retreat from the real and from the world.”16 As topics addressed in the film (such as ways of living well with technology) remain unreconciled points of cultural interest, WALL•E’s status as important public pedagogy remains strong nearly ten years after its release.17 This essay analyzes WALL•E to understand how the interplay of technology and social values is reconciled in popular form.18 My central argument is that WALL•E uses virtues to express ways of living well with technology, but with the premise that such corrective practice follows automatically. Said differently, the film frames virtuous behavior as a reflexive quality of agents rather than something developed through skill and sustained engagement. This analysis provides two points of relevance for rhetorical criticism. First, it illustrates limitations of rhetoric framed through what Kenneth Burke called the agent-act ratio wherein causation of events is explained primarily by the identity of agents.19 Relatedly, it also uncovers a broader trend in popular discourse that shifts the frame for explaining the cause of virtues from a lens of craft (techne) to a lens of crude automation (technology). In the remainder of this essay, I explore how WALL•E presents the possibilities of virtue in people and machines, and explain the implications of such messaging within the function of films as sites for conveying rhetorical agency. Though my later evaluation of WALL•E is critical, such conclusions should not be mistaken for definitive answers on living well with technology. Rather, this essay concludes by calling for increased scrutiny to messages that undermine the importance of rhetorical judgment by imagining agency as automatic. Programming, Humanized Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton describes WALL•E as a story about overcoming systems of rigidity, summarized in the proposition that “irrational love defeats life’s programming.”20 This contest unfolds in three phases.21 In the first act, the robot title character (“Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth Class”) dutifully compacts an endless supply of trash on an abandoned Earth. He is alone in a vast wasteland, save for a pet cockroach. Nevertheless, WALL•E is curious, and pines for a vision of love documented in his VHS copy of the musical Hello Dolly! He seeks companionship—to dance and hold hands—but is thwarted by isolation. When another robot named EVE arrives on Earth, he is smitten. This potential for connection is undermined, however, when WALL•E shows EVE his prized collection of knickknacks from the refuse, including a tender plant in an old boot. When he shows her the plant, EVE stores it away, unexpectedly powers down, and is soon retrieved from Earth by a carrier ship. WALL•E follows EVE into space, signaling the start of the film’s second act. Here we encounter future human culture in the year 2805. We also learn that 700 years earlier, the powerful conglom- erate “Buy N Large” (BNL)—whose remnants and automated billboards still cover the unpopulated Earth—built a massive vessel called the Axiom to house humanity in space as robots cleaned up the planet. Recovery never happened, and people now live, as David Denby states, among the stars on “comfortably bedded little hovercrafts in which screens, constantly switched on, stand in front of their faces.”22 On the Axiom, social health has deteriorated, and connection is thwarted by distraction.23 All motion follows what Stanton calls “self-fulfilling programming,” or “routines” fueled by vapid, consumerist appetites.24 WALL•E disrupts this system. His uniqueness, coupled with changing behavior from the ship’s Captain (McCrea) and passengers (Mary and John), instigate humanity’s return to Earth. The second act also reveals that EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) is a bot programmed to scout for plant life on Earth—a sign the planet is no longer SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL 43 toxic. On the Axiom, however, the plant is a threat to the autopilot (Auto). It conspires to keep the ship in space, following a secret directive issued by the BNL “Global CEO” (read: President) early in the ship’s log after clean-up efforts were abandoned. In the climactic struggle, EVE verifies the plant in the ship’s “holo-detector” after WALL•E wedges it open in an act of self-sacrifice. The Captain turns off the Autopilot. The ship returns to Earth. In a brief final act, connection finally follows: EVE repairs WALL•E and they share companionship, while humans—freed from their infantilized state— assume a nurturing relationship with one another. As the credits role, people are standing for the first time in centuries with the agency to pursue fulfilling lives. WALL•E teaches audiences to take seriously the threat of automation. Ann Howey claims the film reinforces the notion that the “danger of programming is loss of individuality.”25 Additionally, several scholars emphasize character transformations as central to the film, focusing on humans changing: from “mindless consumers to eco-pioneers”26; from “living for recreation” to “relearn[ing] the value of work”27; and from indulging “(childlike) consumerist whims” to embracing “steward- ship” and responsibility.28 Yet a different conclusion of the film emerges when we scrutinize how these transitions occur. As Richard Corliss notes, the “plot pirouettes on the ability of the humans to show as much grit and heart” as WALL•E. In other words, people regain individuality from automation by thinking and acting differently. I argue that WALL•E’s narrative of cultural recovery hinges on characters’ capacity for virtues, or what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.”29 For the human characters that audiences are most likely to identify with,30 these virtues reflect forms of practical reasoning theretofore hindered by seven centuries of isolation and distraction.
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